“We urge the Hamburg Authority for Economics, Transport and Innovation, not to approve the request of the VW subsidiary MOIA to start a trial operation with up to a 1.000 vehicles from January 1, 2019,” stated Christian Brüggmann, First Chairman of the Taxen-Union Hamburg Hansa eV – the leading local taxi-association – today at the final rally of a large taxi demonstration. For such a test 50 to 100 vehicles would be sufficient, said Brüggmann. In addition, the authority still had to disclose what rights and obligations the new provider would have. MOIA wants to position herself between the public transport operator HVV and the taxis and has requested a trial operation over four years. “We have absolutely nothing against fair competition, but if up to 1.000 new vehicles are admitted to the approximately 3.000 taxis in the city of Hamburg, the existence of the Hamburg taxi operators is threatened. We as taxis have an duty to carry any client, we have fixed rates and we have an operational duty. MOIA has none of these duties. This we cannot allow”, Brüggmann said. That’s why he urged Hamburg’s economic authority to invite all interested parties to a round table.”

With 300 members the Taxen-Union Hamburg Hansa eV is the leading taxi-association which serves Hamburg taxi operators. Anyone of the over 2.000 taxi operators can join. It is a member of the national German taxi-association BZP.

• Taxen-Union Hamburg: “The MOIA test operation with up to a 1.000 vehicles should not be approved”

Taxi Helsinki, the largest Finnish taxi company and market-leader in the Helsinki market, has introduced a flat-rate taxi fare, writes Kauppalehti. To get a pre-determined price clients need to use the Taxi Helsinki app. “The app provides the customer with a pre-certified price at the time of the order, and the fixed price varies, for example, from day to day, to take seasonal differences, peak hours and holidays, into account, so that customers know the price before getting into the taxi,” said the Taxi Helsinki CEO Jari Kantonen.

Taxi Helsinki started these fixed-price trips on April 4th. According to the company, they have already been ordered through the app over a thousand times. “In addition to the fixed price, the so-called traditional way, that is, that the rate is generated by the actual journey time and length, is still available,” says Kantonen.

A fixed-price trip includes a five-minute wait at the ordering address and a direct pickup from the destination address. Special demands and additional services will be charged at a different rate.

• Taxi Helsinki started offering fixed taxi fares for app-trips.

You can still register for the sixth Taxi & Mobility Update, which will be held in Brussels on April 19 and 20, 2018 at the Van der Valk Hotel just near Brussels Airport. The key question for this year: ‘Access to the Mobility Market’. Or: Who’s in, who’s out?

You can register here: http://www.mobilityintell.com/registration-update-2018/

Conference programme: T&MIU programme 160418

The development of new forms of mobility increasingly throws up many questions and challenges. It is becoming a complicated puzzle with many (potential) stakeholders. Who takes care of the first and last mile or kilometre? Who gets access to the mobility market? Who drives mobility innovation?

Most of the stakeholders involved in these questions, we’re bringing together in Brussels on April 19 and 20, 2018 for an extensive exchange of views and intensive networking sessions. This is your opportunity to join and network with a high-level international audience of Taxi and
FHV operators, top and middle management, owner-drivers, local, regional and national regulators, government officials, academics, consultants and suppliers.

In previous years around 120 high-level international specialists from all over the world made their way to Amsterdam, where the conference originally started. This year we are expecting at least a 150 highly specialised attendees to come to the Taxi & Mobility Update conference to examine the question who drives tomorrow’s mobility and who gets access to the mobility market.

So hurry and get your registration in. It’s free!

What can you expect at this annual international English-language mobility conference? You will learn about the latest developments in the Taxi, PHV and mobility world. Get the latest information on:

• Mobility in urban and rural areas
• The latest developments in the automotive world
• Autonomous and connected vehicles
• The cities of tomorrow
• E-mobility and Clean Air initiatives
• The new role of the taxi and FHV industry

Network with top speakers and high-level representatives from Europe, USA, Canada, Russia, the Middle-East and many other regions and inform yourself about the latest international Taxi and FHV topics.

Communicate with Taxi and FHV operators, regulators, government representatives, trade representatives, consultants and academics and tell them about your products and services. Be ahead of the latest mobility trends.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to contact and inform the opinion leaders in the Taxi PHV and mobility industry! More info? Contact wim.faber@challans-faber.eu

• This great networking event is only a day away! See you in Brussels!

Photographer Matthew Joseph took pictures of taxi drivers in six cities and asked what drew them to the profession.

“As a photographer it’s people, faces, journeys and stories that fascinate me,” says Joseph. “Taxi drivers tick these boxes in abundance.”

Shot over a 12-month period, Joseph started the project in New York and moved to London, Paris, Rome and Johannesburg and ended in Cape Town.

You’ll find them here

http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-42808641

See more of Matthew Joseph’s photographs on his website.

Automakers will increasingly find themselves in a complicated relationship with ride-hailing companies such as Lyft and Uber. The latter will be competitors but also customers. In the next few years, sales to drivers for Lyft, Uber and others will almost certainly offset declines in car purchases by users of the services.

As shared mobility services expand, auto manufacturers will likely start producing customized vehicles for ride-hailing companies — even as their own mobility services compete head-to-head.

Today, Lyft and Uber have almost no hard assets and are essentially internet-platform companies. Managing and owning vehicles clashes with their current business model. But once level-5 driverless cars come on the scene, they will have little choice. It appears inevitable that they will embrace a new business model that involves ownership of vehicles. A huge part of the success of demand-responsive, app-based ride-hailing companies will be their ability to profit as proprietors of capital, which will mean owning and operating a fleet of automated electric cars. So just as self-driving cars have pulled Detroit into the Silicon Valley game, the power of fleet ownership will likely force ride-hailing companies into partnership with manufacturers.

As ride-hailing companies build their customer base to support pooled services — which require a much larger base than glorified taxi services such as UberX — they will use their purchasing power to push for vehicles that are specifically optimized for their needs. “We haven’t started in on what the vehicle is going to look like. But it probably doesn’t look like a Toyota Camry today,” said Uber’s Andrew Salzberg.

The vehicles will be more passenger-centric — aimed at creating a com­fortable passenger experience — as opposed to today’s driver-centric cars. It’s possible they will include movable partitions or compartments that will allow privacy to poolers who desire it, not unlike barriers between business-class seats on airlines. Since passengers will no longer need to concentrate on driving, there will be an increased focus on entertainment and connectivity within driverless vehicles. Immersive video games, video conferencing or high-speed Internet will become commonplace for many platforms.

In 2016, recognizing this emerging integration of car making and mobil­ity services, Daimler, along with U.S. investor Plug and Play and Stuttgart University, founded an innovation hub in Stuttgart housing a number of auto-focused start-ups. These start-ups, including one developing an in-car audio system that can wirelessly transmit sound to the ears of individ­ual passengers without anyone else hearing the audio, aim to explore ideas related to future mobility. It is part of Daimler’s goal to provide young firms access to the automakers’ resources and knowledge while gleaning promising ideas that can be turned into products that meet the needs of the new mobility marketplace.

Lease deals are another way auto manufacturers might partner with mobility companies. In 2017, Paris-based BlaBlaCar, which focuses on providing seats for long trips, unveiled plans to offer its drivers cheap monthly leases for Opel cars, beginning in France. The start-up’s 9 million drivers buy an estimated 1.3 million new cars each year. BlaBlaCar CEO Nicolas Brusson declared, “We can pioneer a new approach to car ownership based on usage.”

All this points toward a messy era of transition where automak­ers, ride-hailing companies, software companies and other innovators will operate in cooperation and competition simultaneously. Over the decades, they will grope their way through a convoluted series of new partnerships and alliances.

Monetizing the real internet of things

Regardless of whether they own or manage a fleet, proprietors are going to use and monetize their assets to the fullest. That means doing more than just filling vehicles — cars and vans — with the maximum number of passengers. It means finding new ways to unlock value based on the communications, processing capabilities and physical location of those assets and the patrons who use them. The cumulative result will be yet another fundamental shift in the business model for existing manufac­turers and tech companies and the emergence of a vast frontier of new possibilities that could not have existed in the consumer-producer trans­portation system of 2017.

Toyota, for one, is looking for ways to tap the internet of things for higher margins. In April 2016, the company created a new service that lets owners use vehicles like mobile phones. The leader of the new Connected Company business unit, Shigeki Tomoyama, said that “as vehicles become information devices, the car business’s value added will be shifting to the cloud in the future.” As a first step, Toyota unveiled Smart Key Box, a gadget that simplifies carsharing by turning a person’s mobile phone into a car key.

When driverless vehicles arrive, they will dramatically lower the cost of conveying physical things and create opportunities for integrating entertainment and business into the transportation experience. Driver­less trucks will deliver bulk goods between businesses and warehouses. Smaller driverless trucks and cars will deliver parcels to staging depots and homes. Inside passenger vehicles, entertainment and retail will turn into major revenue streams. More lucrative will be the ability to mone­tize the process of physically bringing people together through dynamic pooling. Once the number of poolers becomes high enough, networking and dating services will flourish. All these services will also act as a platform for data gathering — helping companies build more sophisticated patron profiles and better understand tastes

Will automakers make the leap? Mobility is poised to disrupt the business of car companies. This new wave of creative destruction is likely to devastate traditional manufac­turing and energy markets. At the same time, mobility is the perfect hedge. While the profits of auto manufacturing might stagnate, the total revenues in the mobility space might well dwarf anything that currently exists. That’s why Toyota, Ford, Saudi Aramco and many others are already betting on mobility, with investments in the billions. The rising masses of mobility patrons will create an opportunity for proprietors at a scale the world has seldom seen. The repercussions for our society and labor sectors will be far-reaching.Shared mobility and automation innovations will compel producers to become either the proprietors or the victims of a massive sectoral culling. Proprietors will sell trips and services rather than horsepower, and those services will be delivered more efficiently than ever before. Patrons will consume these services in new configurations but with greater con­sciousness of the incremental cost — and none too soon. Mobile computing and human-dependent transportation are a toxic cocktail from a safety standpoint, leading to distracted driving and more car crashes. Car sales are booming around the world, together with associated greenhouse gas emissions. The current producer-consumer economic paradigm is increasingly untenable from an environmental perspective.

But pooling and automation are not guaranteed to emerge victori­ous. Many automakers might decide that they are better off stopping the march to automation at level-4 self-driving cars sold to individuals. Moving to fully driverless level-5 cars might be less profitable because hardware and software inside the vehicle sold by technology companies would become far more profitable than car making. The cars themselves might well become more commoditized because of the intense mar­ket pressure to reduce cost. That commoditized future is a specter that haunts automakers. And it’s why they might try to tap the brakes on an industry shift toward level-5 driverless cars and pooling. There are many ways they could do so. Manufacturers might discourage regulatory approvals of level-5 cars, or they could create local roadblocks to their usage.

Still, there is much hope for the future. New technology, shifting consumer demands and some supportive regulations already have us on the road toward a more technologically dynamic, less environmen­tally destructive and safer transportation system. Getting there depends largely on policy leadership over the coming five to 10 years — and a willingness of societies to bid farewell to stuff and fully embrace the power of proprietors and patrons.

Continue reading:

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/new-symbiosis-between-automakers-and-ride-hailing-companies

• BlaBlaCar CEO Nicolas Brusson declared, “We can pioneer a new approach to car ownership based on usage.”

T&MIU programme 160418

Just a few years ago in New York City, the yellow cab was dominant. The service and comfort weren’t great, the cabs were often dirty, and they were scarce when most needed, but they were so lucrative that a taxi medallion cost over $1 million.

Technology had already disrupted everything from music to retailing, but yellow cabs owned Gotham’s streets. When Uber launched in the Big Apple in 2011, the taxi industry rested on its laurels, confident in its business model. Today, a taxi medallion is only worth $160,000. The lesson for another great New York business — Wall Street — is that no industry can be complacent in our new digital world and every executive leader must be ready to disrupt their own business before others do.

Rapidly advancing technologies — such as cloud hosting, artificial intelligence and blockchain — will create disruption, opportunities and change in financial services. Amid the upheaval, too many executives, like those in the taxi industry, are trying to hold on to what they already have, instead of preparing for what comes next. Among business leaders, 84% say their business is being disrupted or will be soon, and nearly half believe their business model will be obsolete by 2020, according to a report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. Nevertheless, the survey found that, “fewer than half of respondents have a fully formed digital strategy — surely a cause for concern, given the imminent threat of disruption most organizations say they face.” As Harvard’s Howard Stevenson wrote a generation ago in his book Do Lunch or Be Lunch, companies must either evolve or be overrun by others.

Effective leadership requires holding on to a company’s strength in existing technology while at the same time developing innovative new capabilities. It requires responding to what customers want today while developing plans for better products that customers will want in the future. A case in point is the mobile phone. My first cellphone, in 1984, took up a large part of my car’s trunk and came with a chunky handset inside the car and an antenna glued to the car’s roof. The device cost me a small fortune and served only one purpose — making occasional phone calls on the move. Today, phones are powerful computers in our hands, offering us endless services that we never knew we needed, from instant stock trading to better driving navigation. Now, the last thing I do before I go to bed, and the first thing I do when I wake, is check my mobile phone.

Phones were transformed when Apple opened its ecosystem in 2008, allowing other firms to develop all manner of new apps and tools to delight its iPhone customers. Similarly, Broadridge was inspired by the Wall Street paper crisis of the late 1960s, when brokerages were drowning in a sea of paperwork produced by surging trade volumes. Our initial goal was to declutter back offices, but we’ve expanded along with technological innovation. In 2016, we acquired DST Systems Inc. and became the largest distributor of consumer communications, placing us on a quest to reinvent consumer content using next-generation digital cloud-based technology. As part of that effort, we’re collaborating with Amazon Web Services to go beyond simply storing documents and data in the cloud, to using machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to transform the dusty archives of the past into actionable information.

Across the financial services industry, a growing number of smart companies are partnering with firms that have developed platforms, realizing they don’t have to create all their own bespoke technology solutions in-house. Staying current on technology often means collaborating and leveraging platforms — an approach that in financial services has produced substantial change in the past. For example, the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol started out in 1992 as a platform for equity trades between just two firms. But in a little more than a decade it grew into the global standard for trading.

Today, when financial services firms build new products, they should develop them so they can have many uses, just like smartphones do so much more than allow us to make calls. For example, a back-office tool that helps banks take care of trade reconciliations and regulatory reporting should be able to add new capabilities in the future as they are developed. That could include incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to reduce risk and execution errors.

In this digital financial services world, finding the right partner is essential to ensure your company continues to be not only relevant in the future, but also a leader. Maybe someday soon there will be a new book that’s titled, “Do digital transformation or be eliminated.”

Continue reading:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richdaly/2018/03/01/what-wall-street-can-learn-from-yellow-taxis-and-uber/#67a5693e2771

• Do digital transformation or be eliminated.

ViaVan, the joint venture between Via and Mercedes-Benz Vans, on March 5 announced the launch of its shared ride service in Amsterdam. This is the company’s first of several planned deployments in the European market. The Berlin opening, where the local public transport company BVG and ViaVan are teaming up, seems to have stalled, as no local licence has yet been issued.

Through the ViaVan app, a copy of the orginal Bridj-system pioneered three years ago in Boston and another copy called Chariot in San Francisco (the latter now owned by Ford), passengers will be seamlessly matched in real time with other riders headed their way, sharing their trip in a professionally-chauffeured vehicle. ViaVan will serve as an extension of the city’s existing public transit network, providing an affordable and convenient transportation alternative that reduces congestion and carbon emissions.

Rides within the central city zone will cost a flat rate of just €5. To celebrate the launch of the service, all rides within this zone will be just €2 for the first two weeks.

ViaVan claims to use the world’s most efficient on-demand transit platform, developed by Via initially for the New York City market, where today it provides more than 1.5 million shared rides per month. Via licenses its revolutionary technology to transportation players globally powering services across the world, from Australia to Texas. As an innovation-friendly city, that has embraced progressive, environmentally conscious options for getting around, Amsterdam posed a natural fit for the debut of ViaVan’s service.

“ViaVan’s mission is to power truly dynamic mass transit systems, liberated from the constraints of fixed routes and fixed schedules,” said Chris Snyder, CEO of ViaVan. “We believe the future of urban transportation is the sweet spot between inflexible fixed route transit service and expensive private car services. Our technology has powered more than 30 million shared rides around the globe, and we’re delighted to launch in Amsterdam, one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in Europe.”

Using the ViaVan app, passengers select their pick up and drop off location and confirm their ride. ViaVan’s smart algorithm enables multiple riders to seamlessly share a single vehicle. The powerful technology directs passengers to a nearby corner – a virtual bus stop – for pick up and drop off, allowing for quick and efficient shared trips without lengthy detours that take riders out of their way. This enables ViaVan’s system to transport a high volume of passengers while using a fraction of the number of vehicles utilized by taxis or on-demand car services. By powering efficient ride sharing, ViaVan will reduce traffic and carbon emissions in Amsterdam.

• Debatable: lower emissions and less congestion through ViaVan?

Registration is now open for the sixth Taxi & Mobility Update, which will be held in Brussels on April 19 and 20, 2018 at the Van der Valk Hotel just near Brussels Airport. The key question for this year: ‘Access to the Mobility Market’. Or: Who’s in, who’s out?

You can register here: http://www.mobilityintell.com/registration-update-2018/

The development of new forms of mobility increasingly throws up many questions and challenges. It is becoming a complicated puzzle with many (potential) stakeholders. Who takes care of the first and last mile or kilometre? Who gets access to the mobility market? Who drives mobility innovation?

Most of the stakeholders involved in these questions, we’re bringing together in Brussels on April 19 and 20, 2018 for an extensive exchange of views and intensive networking sessions. This is your opportunity to join, sponsor and network with a high-level international audience of Taxi and
FHV operators, top and middle management, owner-drivers, local, regional and national regulators, government officials, academics, consultants and suppliers.

In previous years around 120 high-level international specialists from all over the world made their way to Amsterdam, where the conference originally started. This year we are expecting at least a 150 highly specialised attendees to come to the Taxi & Mobility Update conference to examine the question who drives tomorrow’s mobility and who gets access to the mobility market.

What can you expect at this annual international English-language mobility conference? You will learn about the latest developments in the Taxi, PHV and mobility world. Get the latest information on:

• Mobility in urban and rural areas
• The latest developments in the automotive world
• Autonomous and connected vehicles
• The cities of tomorrow
• E-mobility and Clean Air initiatives
• The new role of the taxi and FHV industry

At Taxi & Mobility Update 2018 you can address, inform and approach this high-level specialised group of experts about your products and services and, of course, enjoy spring-time in Brussels – a special and surprising destination with much to offer. As a stand-alone conference, running for two days, Taxi & Mobility Update offers many new networking, marketing and PR-opportunities you won’t find at other events..

Network with top speakers and high-level representatives from Europe, USA, Canada, Russia, the Middle-East and many other regions and inform yourself about the latest international Taxi and FHV topics. Communicate with Taxi and FHV operators, regulators, government representatives, trade representatives, consultants and academics and tell them about your products and services. Be ahead of the latest mobility trends.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to contact and inform the opinion leaders in the Taxi PHV and mobility industry! More info? Contact wim.faber@challans-faber.eu

• Registration for Taxi & Mobility Update 2018 is now open: http://www.mobilityintell.com/registration-update-2018/

Interested in last year’s presentations? You’ll find them here:

http://www.mobilityintell.com/taxi-mobility-intell-update-2017-presentations-available/

• This great networking event is only six weeks away!

Uber and Lyft have made it easier to get around town, but the service isn’t designed for young people. Unaccompanied passengers under the age of 18 are forbidden from ordering cars.

So how are children supposed to go from one activity to the next when their parents are busy? Well, there’s carpools or nannies, but a ridesharing startup called HopSkipDrive is combining these concepts by hiring drivers that double as caregivers.

It’s been operating in Los Angeles for the past three years and also operates in Orange County and the San Francisco Bay Area. Now the business announced it received $7.4 million in additional funding to fuel its goals. This is on top of the $ 14,1 million raised previously.

The latest financing comes from Student Transportation Inc., which will also be partnering with HopSkipDrive for school bus alternatives. The round also includes participation from existing investors Upfront Ventures and FirstMark Capital.

Greg Bettinelli, a partner at Upfront Ventures and board member at HopSkipDrive said that “by teaming up with school systems they’re not only unlocking massive growth opportunity for the business, they also have potential to help tens of thousands of parents.” HopSkipDrive will also be working with the Los Angeles Office of Education to ensure that foster children are able to get rides to school. Regular users can order rides for just one passenger. Or HopSkipDrive has also been growing its carpooling business, which offers discounted fares.

CEO Joanna McFarland said that she’s especially proud of the screening process of its drivers. “We do far more than most families do to vet a nanny or a babysitter,” she said. “We really set ourselves apart with our dedication to safety.”

She touted a 15-point certification process which she believes is the “strictest in the industry.” Drivers are not only subject to background checks but are also required to have five years of childcare experience. The drivers are 99% female and above the age of 23. They can also double as caregivers after the ride, for an added fee.

• HopSkipDrive raised another $7.4 million for its Uber for kids business. But its drivers are infinitely better vetted…